Editorial: About the Academy Awards

 

Well, this month has been rather quiet in the face of animated releases, other than a few trailers and announcements, so let's do another editorial. This time, I wanted to talk about something that I felt very strongly about, had a deep passion for and could talk about for hours, but instead I figured it would be more pertinent to talk about the Oscars.

What are the Oscars? Not in the literal sense, in the sense of "What do they mean"? Like the question "What is Love?" or "What is the meaning of life?" we aren't asking those questions in the literal sense of the question, I mean we know that love is a feeling and life has a dictionary definition, but in the more meta sense of it all, what really IS love, and does life have a true purpose? In the literal sense, the Oscars, or the Academy Awards are film industry awards given for artistic and technical merit given out every year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and are widely perceived as a very prestigious award. These awards are given by category including "Best Picture", "Best Costume Design", "Best Film Editing", "Best Actor", "Best Documentary Feature" and so on and so forth. These awards have been given out since the late 20s and are still a highly discussed and anticipated event to this day. That is what the Oscars are in the literal sense of the question, but what are they beyond the literal meaning?

Are the Oscars really a prestigious award? Is it all just a marketing gimmick? Is it just a bunch of film people patting themselves on the back? In my opinion, the Oscars are nothing, not even a joke. Jokes mean something, I don't think that the Oscars mean anything.

Like, let's be real here, do any of us actually watch a movie because the Oscars nominated it? Is our enjoyment of a movie lessened because it didn't win an award? Let's be real here, most of us only care about the awards because we want to advertise our favourite movies, it's award season where everybody says "Hey X Movie is an academy award nominee, go check it out" or it's after award season where everybody goes "hey, X Movie won the Academy Award for Y, go check it out!" and I'm fine with that, I really am, I mean a large part of why I am doing this blog is essentially to tell people to watch the movies that I like, or at the very least it is a nice bonus. However, I do think we need to stop pretending like the awards actually do mean anything.

Let's take the "Best Picture" award for example. Tell me, have you ever heard of "Cavalcade" from 1933? How about "The Great Ziegfeld" from 1936? "Marty" from 1955? "Tom Jones" from 1963? "Ordinary People" from 1980? I mean, you might have if you're a serious film buff, or you're a serious watcher of every Oscar winning movie, because all of those movies not only got nominated, but won the award. You know what movie was not nominated for the "Best Picture" award? "Back to the Future", one of the most iconic and beloved movies of the 1980s, but apparently "Hannah and Her Sisters", "Prizzi's Honor" and "Tender Mercies" are the movies that are going to be remembered forever. Yes, I know that it is tough to predict what will be remembered and what will not, but it really does surprise me that "Out of Africa" was the best movie of 1985, when that year gave us "Brazil", "Weird Science", "The Goonies", "Clue" and "Back to the Future".

Sometimes absolutely awful movies also get nominated, screw "Dead Poets Society", I hate that movie, and I refuse to watch "Rain Man" on principle. Also, "The Godfather Part III"? To be fair, the "Best Picture" winner of 1990 was "Dances with Wolves", which is hilarious to me as a fan of "The Red Green Show". Does anybody even care about "Shakespeare in Love" anymore? Granted my favourite movie of all time is an Academy Award Best Picture Winner, 2010's "The King's Speech", but it isn't my favourite movie because of its award status, honestly I'm surprised it won at all considering 2010 also saw "Black Swan", "Inception" and "True Grit" nominated. Really, that point is moot when you take into consideration that only two of my favourite movies were even nominated for "Best Picture", and only one of them won. "The Shawshank Redemption" lost to "Forrest Gump".

Oh, but you really, REALLY want to talk about pointless, let's talk about the Oscars and animated movies. So far, only three animated movies have been nominated for "Best Picture", "Beauty and the Beast", "Up" and "Toy Story 3", all deserving movies definitely, but that's it? Not "The Lion King"? or "Spirted Away"? or "Waltz with Bashir"? No, these movies, if they get nominated at all, get to be nominated for "Best Animated Feature". Since 2001, the Academy Awards have included a "Best Animated" Feature category, and granted this one generally has less to gripe about, however, the amount of animated features released that could be nominated for the award is not that much compared to live-action movies. This can and has lead to films like "Puss in Boots", "Shark Tale" and "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" being nominated for the award, because... why? No really, why? Like, why "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius"? Was 2001 really lacking in animated releases? Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (A god awful movie but it could have easily fit in with the typical Oscar selections), Waking Life, but nope, Jimmy Neutron was the one that needed to be nominated.

Granted the Academy does nominate some lesser known animated movies, like in 2003 they nominated "The Triplets of Belleville", 2007 they nominated "Persepolis" and 2016 they nominated both "My Life as a Zucchini" and "The Red Turtle", so that does give these movies some good exposure to people who would otherwise pass them over, but a lot of people often feel like this category is just lip-service to the medium.

Really, I don't see why anyone should care about the Academy Awards. A lot of the movies that won the biggest award, "Best Picture", are not movies we remember, and the movies that weren't even nominated are movies that everyone remembers and usually loves. It's like that joke about Pitchfork, you can tell an album is good when Pitchfork gives it a 6/10, but you can tell an album is great when Pitchfork gives it a 2/10. It's like that, because so many of the movies that have become pop culture staples, they usually did not get nominated for "Best Picture", seriously, go through the list and see which award winners you've even heard of. Really, that is the big thing about the Academy Awards, they don't mean anything because they're not meant to mean anything. The Academy does not make a movie a timeless classic, time does, and what movies are considered "timeless classics" can change with time, people were saying "Avatar" was going to be one of the most beloved movies of all time, and yeah, it's still somewhat iconic, but the rate it's hype just died down, and "Avatar" didn't even win the 2009 "Best Picture" award, "The Hurt Locker" did. It just goes to show, fad truly is one letter away from fade.

Oh, and to all of you who are like "Oh, I don't care about the Oscars anyway", yeah, keep telling yourself that as you check to see if "Encanto" beat "Raya and the Last Dragon", or as you rant on Twitter if it looses, or celebrate if it wins. Yeah, you do care on some level, and on some level even I do, because I wrote this damn blog, but if you want an editorial about "Academy Award Nominees" or "Why X movie should have won the award instead of Y", sorry, you're not gonna get it out of me, because from this point on, I make zero plans to care about the Academy Awards.

DuckTales The Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990) - A fun, if basic, movie based on a fun TV Series.

Last year I posted an editorial about the 2017 DuckTales reboot. Originally I wanted it to build up to this review, however, because I wanted to review Into The Spider-verse in December, and I normally take January off, the actual reveal that I was going to review this movie would have been really clunky. Still, DuckTales 2017 is one of my favourite TV Shows of all time, and the original 1987 series remains a fun, iconic, and significant piece of Animation History, being one of the kickstarts to the Disney Renaissance, which a lot of people forget was also a huge television thing as Disney was producing hit series after hit series around the same time in the Disney Afternoon. While DuckTales has aged, its impact cannot be overlooked, being one of the most beloved Disney cartoons, and having one of the most beloved licensed video games. Which makes it curious that not a lot of people really talk about the movie. Does that mean that the movie is the weakest entry in the DuckTales franchise?

Our favourite treasure hunting ducks find the lost treasure of Collie Baba, but an evil sorcerer steals the treasure and sends them to their supposed doom. However, because this is the Duck family, they survive and escape with a single oil lamp. Unfortunately, this is what the sorcerer, Merlock (Yes that did make me think of World of Warcraft a lot), was after, for this oil lamp contained a genie. So, Merlock and his henchman, Dijon, hunt down the lamp as Scrooge, the Nephews and Webby all make their own wishes. Plot wise, I don't think movie has a lot of surprises, you can probably guess that the henchman is gonna turn on the villain for his own selfish wishes, and the villain will get his hands on the McGuffin somehow, and do I even need to spoil what the Genie's arc is? Still, the plot wasn't sloppy, and it flowed very well. Much like Klaus, the plot is not bad, just predictable.

That being said, sometimes it is fun to watch characters you love going through a familiar plot, probably why so many of these movies based on TV shows are road trip movies... Anyway, these are the same characters we know and love from the original TV show, Scrooge and The Nephews and Webby and Launchpad and Mrs. Beakley. I do wish we got some cameos from other favourite characters, like Gizmoduck, Gyro Gearloose, and hey, the villain was an evil sorcerer, why couldn't we have Magica DeSpell here as well? To be fair, they do add the new characters of Genie, Dijon and Merlock. Dijon, who would in the reboot become Faris Djinn, is not the greatest character. In a post "Trouble with Apu" world I can see this character not sitting well with some viewers, as for me, he wasn't too bad, but I am not in much of a position to make a fair call. I think it might have been that he was not as bad as I thought he'd be, but when you imagine the worst, anything is an improvement. As for the other two, they were pretty fun. Genie is voiced by Rip Taylor, and that is as fun as it sounds. Merlock is voiced by Christopher Lloyd, and it is a Christopher Lloyd performance. He's one of those voices that immediately makes a great villain, up there with Vincent Price and Tim Curry. I will say that Merlock does have his dumb moments, like trying to press an elevator button as a cockroach, when he was alone. Still, he was a fun villain, but maybe not as good as Magica DeSpell or the Reboot's Flintheart Glomgold.

The technicals of the movie are really good, although Disney obviously handed this movie off to a smaller studio, DisneyMovie Toons to be exact, and it does not look as good as Disney's more cinematic movies. Honestly, it is kind of a shame, I would have loved to see this movie be given the same budget and time as something like The Little Mermaid or Rescuers Down Under, but looking at what we got, this movie still looks great. It was released theatrically, which does mean that the animation does have to look cleaner and of a higher quality, but I think it works well enough here, the characters don't look too clean or too well animated to throw anyone off. The music was done by David Newman, who worked with Disney before on Tim Burton's short film Frankenweenie, and also did the scores for The War of the Roses, The Brave Little Toaster and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. It was a pretty solid score done here, well enough that I might pick up the soundtrack if I happen to find a copy.

So with all that you may think the movie is fine, if a little generic, and yeah, it can be. However, the key to any adventure story is the adventure, and I think this movie was a fun and often somewhat intense adventure. The scene where Merlock is transforming Scrooge's money bin to an admittedly absurd evil fortress (seriously Bowser is not that extra) is a scene I actually have a vague memory of one moment from that sequence as a kid, and it being oddly terrifying to me, maybe it was the harsh reds and dark greys. Even then, when the movie is having a thrilling scene, it can be rather thrilling, I can imagine young children would really get into the more intense moments. Even when the movie is not having a thrilling moment and is just having a more mundane and slice-of-life moment, it's still a charming watch. I enjoyed watching the Nephews and Webby interact with Genie, I enjoyed watching Scrooge interact with Genie, I enjoyed these characters in this scenario.

DuckTales The Movie can be a bit of a predictable watch. I will not hide the fact, however, if you can look past that you will find an exciting adventure, charming characters and some wonderful animation and music. I can definitely say that I enjoyed this movie, so if you love DuckTales, love fun adventures, or just want a fun movie to kill an hour and a bit, I can say check this movie out. It's fun, charming and enjoyable, if a little bit predictable. A definite Recommendation from me!